Pakistan inherits a very rich and refined tradition of art which goes back to Mughal painting, Buddhist sculpture, and to the pictorial and plastic arts of the Indus Valley civilisation and cultures which preceded it.
The sculptured figures of man and animals which have been recovered from Harrappa and Mohenjodaro reveal an acute sense of perception and mastery over form, eg, the famous Dancing Girl in bronze and the male limestone torsoes.
Sculpture reached its zenith during the Buddhist period in Gandhara. It is claimed the Gandhara sculptures were the first to have established the type and form of the anthropomorphic Buddha.
Alongwith the seated or standing individual images of Buddha, he is also presented as a human in historical compositions. Side by side with idealised images, one can find heads which have been more objectively executed. The early sculptures of Gandhara were carved in blue schist and green phyllite, but later stucco or lime plaster was employed as the principal medium.
Images of stone and stucco were both painted and embellished with gold. Unfortunately, specimens of painting are rare but on the bases of Buddhist frescoes which have survived in Afghanistan, one can conjecture that painting must have been popular, particularly when statues were painted to make them look more life-like. Gandhara art came to an end with the invasion of the Huns in the 5th century.
The post Gandhara period was essentially a period of decay and it was only when Babar laid down the foundations of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century that the arts were revitalised once again to achieve new standards of excellence. During the succeeding three centuries, Emperors Humayun, Akbar, Jehangir and Shah Jehan, in particular, helped to develop a school of miniature painting which, relying on the Persian, Central Asian and local traditions, evolved a style and expression of painting which today enjoys a very high prestige in the world.
The Mughal painter was a great observer of people and events. He was objective but expressed his perceptions with warmth. He was inquisitive about nature and his environment, and recorded the flora and fauna with tremendous charm and faithfulness to their mood, habitat and colour. Above all he was a fine draughtsman and rendered the human face and personality with great insight.
After the Mughals, painting continued to be practised in the court of the Sikhs, and in the Hill states of the Punjab. The Sikh Sardars were extremely fond of portraiture and to have their likeness painted, preferably riding a horse. Figure compositions done during the period often display greater movement and demonstrate a more expressive employment of colour. Unlike mostly secular paintings done for the Sikhs, the miniatures of the Hill states are based on religious themes.
The romantic life of the Mahabharat, Ramayana, and of Radha and Krishna is, however, pictorialised in forms established by the great Mughal painters. The deities are presented as humans intermingling with common people, performing their heroic feats or frolicking with attractive maidens in the natural, rich and verdant landscape of the Hill states.
With the annexation of the Punjab in the mid 19th century, the British introduced a new trend in painting which was strengthened by the establishment of the Mayo School of Arts and Crafts at Lahore. While local artists were patronised to paint in their traditional styles, they were also encouraged to improve themselves by doing water colour and simulating ideals of Victorian art, which led to painting of serene landscapes flooded with sunsets, views of peaks covered with pink snow and drowned in ultramarine shadows, of portraits of beggars and illustrative pictures of scenes and places considered typically local.
A.R. Chughtai and Ustad Allah Buksh were leading figures of the time. Chughtai represented the classical traditions of painting which can be traced back to the impeccable Persian and Mughal miniatures and to the idealised forms of Ajanta. Chughtai drew from all these sources, as well as from the Japanese, the European, and the Neo-Bengal School. But what Chughtai created was not an amalgam of these influences but something unique to his technique, and his own vision.
His painting, on the one hand, attempts to recall our great past and on the other, wishes to escape to a land of eternal spring, in eternal bliss where fair maidens are not distracted by mundane facts of life. When sometime reality casts its shadown on the transluscent surface of his colours, it is seldom allowed to inflict on the refined mood of his paintings.
Chughtai's well known contemporary, Ustad Allah Buksh, was a self-taught painter who learnt his craft by doing cinema posters, studio sets and theatre back-drops. Due to the very nature of work entrusted to him, he was required to create an illusion of reality for which he naturally relied on chiaroscuro and perspective.
Allah Buksh's paintings, with their pastel greens, pinks and azure shades, conjures a romantic world. Occasionally, he can also express deeper feelings which may stir our imagination. This new trend in painting was greatly advanced by Amrita Shergil who had been trained in painting in the art centres of Europe. Unlike Allah Buksh who was self-taught, Amrita, however, tried to expel romance and sentimentality from her work and attempted to see life and people with a clear vision. Unfortunately, she died very young.
Even during her rich but short career, she mostly remained in Europe. One, therefore, wonders if her work or ideas made any real impact on her contemporaries.
When Amrita Shergil died at Lahore, Anna Molka Ahmed presided over the department of Fine Arts, Punjab University, which she had established a few years earlier. The department provided the student an opportunity to draw and paint from life, which further strengthened the European mode of painting.
Many students of this period such as Khalid Iqbal, Naseem Hafeez Qazi, Anwar Afzal and Zakia Malik later established themselves as important art teachers and painters. Among these, Khalid Iqbal became a principal force in establishing a certain new direction in painting which had not been envisaged by the emerging modern trend at the time, which was mainly to emulate western art.
The first inspiration of Modern movement came from impressionism and post impression, and then from Cubism and abstract art in general. Zubeida Agha exhibited her abstract works as far back as 1949. These were symbolic in imagery and their muddy colours expressed a reflective mood. Her later canvases, however, do not express a solemn world of dreams but the essence of living things and ideas.
The young painters of the fifties like Moyeen Najmi, Ali Imam, Ahmad Parvez, A.J. Shemza and S. Safdar found Chughtai and Allah Bukhsh old fashioned. They criticised their work for being foreign to the spirit of modern age. In the beginning they spent much time, particularly Moyeen and Ali Imam, in painting landscapes and street scenes in an impressionist technique but later they became more preoccupied with abstract art.
A.J. Shemza who always relished making linear patterns, partly abandoned his interest in abstract and botanical structures to incorporate forms of Arab and Persian calligraphy, producing some delightful pieces. Ahmed Parvez's painting, on the contrary, is refined but more forceful in character. He uses colour with temerity and executes his forms with a flexible and commanding wrist. Ali Imam's work is more thoughtful. In his better works there is a unity of experience and aesthetic purpose.
Among the abstract painters of this period, Shakir Ali played a pivotal role. He had been to the Slade and then to France and Czechoslovakia, arriving in Pakistan in the early fifties when hybrid forms of abstract art were being devised.
Shakir's principal works are mostly large, where meaningful human form and images are casually delineated with artistic brevity. Shakir's canvases depict the progress of his ideas and emotions as he journeyed through life to the very end. He enhanced the intellectual and emotional content of his work by employing symbols, and images of the sun, flowers, and birds which widened the meaning and social significance of his content.
Sadequain, one of the country's leading figurative painters, also used symbols and images with great profusion to make his social comments, or to narrate his human themes. Even in his calligraphies he employs the alphabets to form words in such a manner that they take on a pictorial form. For instance, he has crowned one of his murals with the word "Aaj", meaning today, in such a manner that the Alif with the Mud acquire the form of a hammer and Jeem that of a sickle.
Today (Aaj) thus becomes the today of workers and peasants. Sadequain has popularised painting among the average citizen more than any other painter after A.R. Chughtai and Allah Bukhsh. He has covered more canvas with paint than perhaps all of us painters put together. His murals, some of them gargantuan in size, can be seen scattered all over the country.
The political movements in the late sixties and the seventies, particularly the student and the working class movements, provided great encouragement to artists who maintained that art should not serve a social elite but portray life, people, and important ideas of the time. My own works of this period make an attempt to depict important thoughts and events, and express aspirations of people, in an unambiguous manner, with a sense of immediacy.
Most of my present work draws upon nature. Sometimes a simple sight evolves into an image becoming vividly expressive of a larger meaning and social significance - like a visibly dead laburnum bursting to life with a riot of yellow showers. These developments as mentioned earlier, were partly a result of Khalid Iqbal's insistance on observing life. While painting he refused to ape or adopt modes and devices of the modern kind, maintaining that the outside world has a deep and significant relationship with man's inner life.
Khalid combines an acute sense of tone and precision in defining and mapping space and forms. He establishes the character and mood of the scene, and sometimes his own state of mind, with restrained emotions. A significant recent development in our painting has been the emergence of a host of landscape painters.
This sets our painting apart from many other countries. Art in most countries under the influence of the school of Paris and then later of New York have, in the past, tried to do away with the image of man. Even today when the human image is back in western painting, largely due to the pop-art and post-Dada Movements, there are artists who would not abandon the old trend.
It is consequently all the more courageous for these young painters to insist on being "provincial", and to paint man and the landscape in which they live and breathe. Ghulam Rasul, Zulqarnain Haider, Ghulam Mustafa, and Iqbal Hussian, to name a few, have elicited considerable support from the growing number of art viewers, and their contemporaries in recent years.
Among the leading artists who stylistically or aesthetically represent the western modern art movement are Ismaeel Gulgee and Zahoorul Akhlaque. Gulgee is a man of many talents.
He can make portraits in mosaic of the Aga Khan and Ronald Reagan from lapis-lazuli, supervise fabrication of the huge golden crescent mounted on the dome of the multi-million dollar Faisal Mosque at Islamabad, and at the same time produce abstract calligraphic works with gestural strokes reminding one of the New York action painters of the sixties. His canvases are however extremely rich in colour and texture, the effect of which is enhanced by his use of gold leaf and coloured beads of glass.
Although Zahoor also employs traditional design elements to aesthetically enrich his paintings, he eschews undisguised ornamental effects. In the past his work was non-figurative, employing aesthetics of ancient inscriptions and calligraphy. His recent canvases which employ a similar aesthetic procedure to express his concern for the danger of atomic proliferation are a bit abstruse. Most of these canvases lend a sense of mystery to the theme, but at the expense of meaning.
Naheed, Qudsia Nisar, Meher Afroze and Mansoora Hassan have also pursued the non-objective trend in painting in the past. They have however, evolved interesting individual styles of expression which are quite distinctive and true to the spirit of their character. Lubna in the past has also painted in similar vein but human images have now made a crowded entry into her work.
Mansoora Hassan's etchings and intaglio prints now also depend a lot of human and cultural images. It is evident that the trend to depict environment is back. Abstract painters like Zubaida Javed, Jameel Naqsh and Mansoor Rahi have adhered to the portrayal of man and life, and continue to do so. Zubaida translates her quintessential visual perceptions on to her small canvases.
Jameel Naqsh is one of our rare artists who has persisted with a single theme in his work. He has painted woman with a pigeon theme in inexhaustible form and manners. The artist and the subject have never got tired of each other. They have indeed aged with time but remained fresh. There are few modern painters today who can idealise the female form with his skill and paint it with his sensitivity.
The only other artist who has studied the nude with great command has been Colin David. Colin's nudes are painted in a direct representational style. He is an extremely fine draughtsman which enables him to render the human form with natural ease. Bashir Mirza, also an articulate painter of the human figure, has in he past visualised the nude in rather aggressive, erotic postures.
His later work presents the modern 'Eve' with more poetic sentiments. Iqbal Hussain has executed some life-size nudes and figure compositions of prostitutes and singing girls of Lahore. He depicts his subjects with sympathetic frankness and youthful exuberance.
Naseem Hafeez Qazi's compositions of children transport us to a world of diffeent sentiments and realities. Naseem's children are poor children doing adult tasks or playing common traditional games. Mansoor Rahi has also done some rather graphic canvases in his peculiar cubistic style on the subject of children, expressing their dreams, nightmares, and their existence in a world of hunger, fear, war and destruction.
The number of painters who like to use painting as a vehicle to make comment or attack is on the increase not only in Pakistan but all over the world. At one time 'purity' of art was celebrated and insisted upon. Art in order to be good had to be pure and distilled of any external reference. Today, once again, it need not be so.
Art can be "impure" if it enhances our awareness of important issues and events of our day. Salima Hashmi and A.R. Nagori are both impure painters in this sense. Salima focuses attention on women's physical and sexual subjugation and exploitation in a world ruled by men. Her work is quite subtle and aesthetically well-planned. In contract, Nagori's canvases are executed without any patience for aesthetic refinement.
He portrays and expresses the suffering of people at the hands of the forces of repression during the military regime. Whether he and other painters will choose to paint a few cheerful canvases on the flowering of democracy is yet to be seen.- Ijaz-ul Hassan
(Ijaz-ul-Hussan is a painter, a writer on art and a former teacher of the National College of Arts, Lahore)
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